© Smithsonian Institute, Human Studies Film Archives Collection
N!ai, a nine-year-old Ju/'hoansi, holding her little cousin. She is one of the characters in John Marshall’s films.

When John Marshall accompanied his father on an expedition to Namibia in 1950, he was just a teenager, and had no idea that he was embarking on the first of many fascinating journeys that would make up his life’s work. His six-hour series “A Kalahari Family”, the product of five decades of filming, takes us across thousands of years of history.

Housed in the Human Studies Film Archives at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, the John Marshall Ju/’hoan Bushman Film and Video Collection, 1950 – 2000 was recently added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.
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Born on November 12, 1932, John Marshall grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts and on his family’s farm in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Almost as remarkable as the footage he shot is the story of how his entire family, prosperous Bostonians, forged such a close bond with the Ju/'hoansi (prononced “ju-wansi”) Bushmen of the Kalahari, a tribe of hunter-gatherers in the Nyae Nyae region of North-East Namibia, that they returned to Africa again and again.

Marshall first picked up a camera in 1950, at age 18, when he accompanied his father, Laurence Marshall, a top American industrialist, on the first of many expeditions to the Kalahari Desert. The entire family accompanied them on a second trip in 1951, staying for a month and a half. It was a transformative experience for them all – they returned in 1953, staying for a year and a half this time.

Lorna Marshall, an English literature teacher, became an anthropologist only to be able to unravel the intricacies of the Ju’/hoan clan’s familial ties. Gaining acclaim in the academic world, Lorna worked on many films, including “First Film,” which allows viewers to see some of John Marshall’s earliest footage.

John’s sister, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, is the author of several books, including “The Harmless People” and “Warrior Herdsmen,” about the Dodoth people of Uganda, whose pastoral life was very different from that of the Ju/’hoansi.

“It’s so wonderful that UNESCO has given John the recognition he so richly deserved,” Elizabeth Marshall Thomas said on the occasion of the inscription of John Marshall’s collection of films into the Memory of the World Register in July of 2009. “But recognition didn’t mean as much to him as getting done what he did – he would have produced what he did whether or not he got any recognition at all.”

Much of Marshall’s work focuses on one particular extended family, that of Toma Tsamko. Marshall met Toma under a baobab tree on his first visit to /Gautcha, an area with a large salt pan and a permanent waterhole. It was the start of a mutually enriching relationship, one that would span nearly half a century.

“John fell in love with these people, and once they got to know each other – learning the language so quickly helped – it was like a wonderful dream for him, the hunting trips, and the different way of life. They literally became his family,” his wife, Alexandra Eliot Marshall reminisces. “He was never condescending – the way John perceived it, and documented it and lived with it, he never glamorized these people. He told their story with an intimacy that came from years of knowing them, both in good times and bad times, and across four generations of the Ju’/hoansi.”

Film archivist Karma Foley, who has worked closely with Marshall and now works on the Collection, describes what it was like to work with the filmmaker. “Working with John was a wonderful experience. It was a very formative time in my life, having just graduated from college, and it was incredible to have the opportunity to work with such rich and beautiful material, and to learn from someone who was so talented and so passionate. John was very demanding of himself and of those who worked with him. He cared about the craft of filmmaking, of course, but he was also keenly aware of the power of the moving image and he felt a great responsibility to represent the Ju/'hoansi accurately. For me, working in video production was very exciting, but working with John, I quickly learned that it was much more than that. He used film as an advocacy tool, he used it to educate. There was a great deal of purpose and commitment behind his work.”

Those who worked with Marshall stress that despite his significant aesthetic and theoretical contributions to documentary, he believed that the people in front of the camera were more important than the filmmaker himself. Throughout his career, he battled “the Myth”, the popular notion among Westerners that the Bushmen didn’t know what was best for them and needed help from "developed" society.

Marshall saw himself as a reporter, not a spokesman for the Ju/’hoansi, often allowing them to describe their lives in their own words.

“John was extremely committed to helping the Ju/'hoansi. He basically gave up his filmmaking career in 1980 to do grassroots development and advocacy work in Namibia. He dedicated so much of his life to trying to help,” says Foley, who has accompanied Marshall on trips to Africa and returned since. “That kind of commitment is very rare. Personally I think it comes from love, a very deep love and respect that he had for the people he considered his second family. And that's what I see in so much of the footage he shot over all those years - tremendous love and respect.”

It was probably due to this close relationship with the Ju/’hoansi that Marshall was forced to leave South West Africa in 1958 after his visa expired, and was not allowed to return for twenty years.

Meanwhile, Marshall became well-established as a cinema vérité filmmaker in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1968, Marshall and American filmmaker Timothy Asch, who had filmed the Yanomamo Indians in Venezuela, founded Documentary Educational Resources, a nonprofit that produces and distributes anthropological films for classroom use.

In 1978 Marshall was allowed to return to Nyae Nyae, only to find his Ju’/hoan friends had lost much of their land to the South African government and could no longer survive as hunters. Virtually abandoning his filmmaking, Marshall started a foundation to bring the Ju/'hoansi closer to self-sufficiency. The fund allowed them to establish water access, learn subsistence farming, and establish a local government.

Marshall’s epic five-part series, “A Kalahari Family,” is culled from more than a million feet of footage shot between1950-2000. “In the course of six hours, you actually traverse thousands of years of history,” says documentary filmmaker Jayasinhji Jhala, associate professor of anthropology at Temple University, Pennsylvania, and a close friend of Marshall’s. According to Jhala, there is nothing that remotely compares to this remarkable body of work. Besides being a comprehensive record of the Ju/’hoansi, the series charts Marshall's evolution from filmmaker to activist.

Marshall’s final visit to Nyae Nyae was in 2004. He died due to complications from lung cancer in April 2005.

Shiraz Sidhva, Indian journalist, correspondent for the UNESCO Courier

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Photo 2 © Smithsonian Institute, Human Studies Film Archives Collection
Toma Tsamko greeting John Marshall, after a long absence, in 1978.

Photo 3 : © Claire Ritchie
Toma Tsamko (in suit and tie) taking part in a political rally for the SWAPO party before Namibia's first democratic elections. Tsamko was the first president of the Nyae Nyae Farmers' Coop and entered politics in 1980.